End of the year: What to work on

If you are in almost any aspect of the dental business, at this time of year, activity has downshifted from into a speed anywhere from slow to nonexistent.  A lot of orthodontic practices have either shut down operations for the rest of the year or are knocking out some final shorts and longs before settling in.  Suppliers are stopping deliveries to start working on year end inventory.  If you have a general dental practice, some folks may be coming in for last-minute, pre-holiday cleanings and whitenings, but major procedures will probably be delayed until after the holiday season.

Rather than shutting things down completely and spending your days watching A Christmas Story, this is the perfect time to work on projects and initiatives to get ready for the new year.

Specifically, here are the things to focus on:

The 3 best queuing statistics

Queueing systems can be nice (see a more detailed description of those) and enable you to identify and unblock traffic jams during the work day.  But those systems also generate a tremendous amount of data and to not use that information to improve your practice would be a waste of another resource to enable you to simultaneously improve the quality of patient service and your bottom line.

When you track every patient’s movement at every step of the process during a patient day, you can imagine the amount of data available to you.  Please do not print and review daily detailed reports.  That will lead you to errors with anecodotal stories (this one time, on a patient day, we knocked out shorts in 8 minutes) and confusion from the excess of data.

And please do not make the mistake I made early in my history by generating tons of data and reports that no one in his or her right mind would spend time poring over.  Rather, compile the data (or have us compile the data) into useful pieces and focus on the exception to norms or threshholds exceeded.  

With that, here are 3 of the top pieces of data you can generate from your queuing system: